Table of contents:
- 1. Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in Ulyanovsk
- 2. On the tram
- 3. Portrait of a girl
- 4. At the mausoleum
- 5. Fascinating realism
- 6. Park in Moscow
- 7. Russian ballerinas
- 8. Soviet woman
- 9. USSR, 1970
Video: How they lived in the USSR in the 1970s: Non-dressy photographs of documentary filmmaker Valery Shchekoldin
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Valery Petrovich Shchekoldin is an outstanding Russian photographer who, during his lifetime, became a classic of documentary photography. Shchekoldin filmed in Russia and the former Soviet Union, in Chechnya and other hot spots. The heroes of Shchekoldin's photographs are old people, children from orphanages, teenagers from correctional colonies and prisons, residents of nursing homes.
1. Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev in Ulyanovsk
2. On the tram
Valery Shchekoldin's works are not a kind of balanced ideal look at the difficult times of our history, but they try to present the viewer with a transparent view of events.
3. Portrait of a girl
The main body of the author's photographs covers a period of more than thirty years: from the late 1960s to the late 1990s, which, on the one hand, conveys the timelessness of the difficult life of ordinary people, and on the other hand, makes it clear that a poor life was burdened for many by a series of wars and persecution of local residents.
4. At the mausoleum
At the same time, the photographer himself does not separate the shooting of the times of the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet world, does not oppose them to each other, creating an unbroken chain of history. Schekoldin states: “Epochs seem to affect everyone in the same way, but everyone has different resistance and variability to them. And therefore a person is more interesting than an era. It is interesting, of course, how circumstances affect a person. It is interesting how a person resists these circumstances."
5. Fascinating realism
Many of the photographer's works remain unnoticed, because propagandists on both sides to this day select either exclusively sleek photographs, or photographs that, without knowledge of the exposure, may seem outright fiction. In support of this, the master frankly complains that at the time of the collapse of the USSR, his photographs, taken to reflect the truth, were used as reverse propaganda.
6. Park in Moscow
It is not surprising that Valery Shchekoldin, even calling his early style "socialistinism", never considered himself an anti-Soviet, specifying that "he tried to translate the language of political symbols into the language of ordinary aesthetics." At the same time, in contrast to the "anti-Soviets" who poured into the streams, the master received the long-awaited recognition after 1991, and prestigious awards came to him even later. The philosopher Alexander Zinoviev, in an interview telling about the history when he and his comrades created a society with the aim of assassinating Stalin, focused on the fact that they did it not because of anti-communism, but because, on the contrary, they were "too communists."
7. Russian ballerinas
The early years of Soviet power, when creativity “came from the masses,” the photographer contrasts with the Brezhnev era, when “creativity” often descended from above according to the order. And there is almost nothing surprising in the fact that Shchekoldin knew Zinoviev's works and agreed with them.
8. Soviet woman
It was the dissonance between the preached and the professed upper classes that the photographer tried to reveal. When asked about a protest against the system, the dismayed journalist hears: “There was no protest against the system. Communism and socialism are not a system, they are philosophy, they are a worldview. I am not saying that the teaching of socialism is in principle impossible. I say that his priests were rather narrow-minded people. At the same time, the people considered themselves ten times more stupid. But for some reason I do not like it when I and those around me are held for fools."
9. USSR, 1970
Analyzing the first failures in the field of photojournalism, Shchekoldin was surprised to realize that his pictures are often not taken to print because they depict a normal life, while all magazines print life "which does not exist."
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